Ivan Eyre, not your Group of Seven acolyte

Don Bain. Ivan Eyre Pavilion Gallery. (1999) Eyre was Born in Saskatchewan in 1935, but spent most of his life in Winnipeg, where he taught art at the University of Manitoba from 1959 to 1992. He’s best known for his landscapes, and his blending of surrealism and abstraction in his figurative paintings. I find his work very interesting, but oddly unmoving. Perhaps there’s something in them that’s alien to me, and which I therefore cannot see. That would be Eyre’s take on my response, since he claims that we see only something of ourselves in any painting, and can’t see whatever else is in it. His figurative paintings (whose figures are often himself and his family members) seem to me to be coded expressions of his hidden self. That’s what makes their content interesting. I kept thinking “Freud”, which isn’t a compliment.
     The pictures are often striking in their collage-like layering of imagery and deliberately off-kilter composition. Their enigmatic signs and symbols make them suitable for the kind of public art that proclaims corporate support for culture. They don’t threaten easy social or political readings.
     His landscapes are, he claims, wholly imaginary; at any rate, he doesn’t paint from photos or plein air sketches. Several times on his travels he has discovered a landscape that looks like one of his paintings. He attaches a mystical significance to these coincidences. He’s also made a number of sculptures, which like his figurative paintings combine surrealism and abstraction.

     He’s definitely not a Group-of-Sevenish artist.
     We bought this book on a trip West, when we spent a day at Assiniboine Park and the Pavilion Gallery. Look up Eyre online, the available images cover a much wider range than in this book. It’s a well done summary of his life and work. **½